Alec Baldwin Denies He Pulled the Trigger

CLAY: I don’t understand what’s going on with this Alec Baldwin interview. He’s claiming that he didn’t actually pull the trigger that led —

BUCK: I don’t get this.

CLAY: — to the shooting. You’re more of a firearms expert than I am. He’s claiming the gun discharged on its own? Like what is his defense here?

BUCK: We actually have him saying it. Mike, do we have it? He says it. Alec Baldwin, again — also, a huge lib and not a very nice person, but a very good actor.

CLAY: A great actor.

BUCK: I call it like it is. He’s a good actor.

CLAY: He’s phenomenal on 30 Rock, which was a hysterical television show.

BUCK: Great on The Hunt for Red October. Anyway, he’s a talented, one of the best hosts for SNL when SNL used to be funny, when he would do the guest hosting. He may have been among the most frequent guest hosts of it too. He’s got a lot of range. He’s funny. He also was in this horrible incident, and here’s what he says about the situation.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It wasn’t in the script for trigger to be pulled.

BALDWIN: The trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You never pulled the trigger?

BALDWIN: No, no, no, no! I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger at them. Never.

BUCK: We’ll have to get a further explanation of this one.

CLAY: It doesn’t make any sense then, because the gun accidentally discharged while he was pointing it at somebody. Why didn’t it discharge before then?

BUCK: Yeah. Guns don’t accidentally discharge. People accidentally discharge guns.

CLAY: Correct. That’s what I’m saying. For this scenario — and you would think, by the way, it’s also on film, right? There would have to be film. I would think that there’s some sort of evidence of what exactly happened. So maybe he’s trying to argue that somehow the trigger was, like, he was shaking. I don’t even know what his defense is. But that is a super-weird line to have.

We’ll see whether or not any charges are going to come out of this, because obviously the prop person who had a loaded gun in the first place had to have failed in order for this situation to have arisen. But I didn’t pull a trigger on a gun that happened to shoot someone while it was in my hand seems like a tough defense.

BUCK: On to something less impressing. Favorite western movie, Travis. By the way, some people are going to get very fired up at you in this audience. Better watch what you say on this one. Favorite western.

CLAY: Favorite western? The question to me is, are you wanting like the best western?

BUCK: Stop lawyering this. Stop lawyering this.

CLAY: My favorite to watch is Young Guns. When I was a kid, when I was a kid, Young Guns 1 and 2, I was obsessed with. Now I also love, oh, what’s the —

BUCK: Can I offer up one since we’re…? I would say Tombstone.

CLAY: That’s what I was going to say.

BUCK: I had a feeling you were going to go there.

CLAY: I was going to Tombstone, also very fantastic. That’s also a bit more of sometimes you watch. My example on Yellowstone, Yellowstone is not high-end art.

BUCK: Everyone in Yellowstone is such a bad person. They’re all bad people.

CLAY: Succession. There aren’t a lot of good people in Succession.

BUCK: But you know, I don’t know.

CLAY: But in terms of just sheer popcorn movie, when I was a kid, I loved Young Guns 1 and 2. Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, Lou Diamond Phillips.

BUCK: I watched it a thousand times. I could go through the whole script with you now if wanted to. I remember most of the lines from it. It was a good Charlie Sheen performance, doesn’t last very long. Sorry about that spoiler. Emilio Estevez was great. It is the best Lou Diamond Phillips performance of all time.

Tombstone, for me, is, for the modern western, the most watchable and the most enjoyable. So good for what it is. If you are going old school, I had never seen The Outlaw Josey Wales before. I watched it maybe a couple of months ago. Holds up very well. The so-called spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood, I think, it’s tough to beat The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, some of those. But I’ve got to say Hostiles and also the remake of True Grit are also really good westerns.

CLAY: I liked True Grit, Dances With Wolves, old-school Kevin Costner.

BUCK: You love Kevin Costner. What’s it with Clay and Kevin Costner?

CLAY: He’s a great talent. I watched until it got way too weird for me. Westworld was great, old school, kind of the way that they were melding past and present and all the craziness going on there. It was a really fun western.

BUCK: Michael Crichton kind of thing.

CLAY: Spiraled out of control. I couldn’t keep up.